Concert Ticket Prices Are Being Artificially Inflated Online, Here’s How Not to Get Scammed

The “dynamic pricing” technique is currently wreaking havoc on show prices. Here’s how to get around it.

As Oasis announced their return to tour, the UK government has highlighted a marketing strategy behind the price hikes and promised to look into it: the practice of “dynamic pricing”.

This method consists of adjusting the ticket sales price in real time according to consumer demand. The greater the demand, the more the price increases. The prices offered are then often higher than when the marketing was announced. For the Oasis concert, some tickets initially displayed at 178 euros rose to more than 415 euros on the Ticketmaster platform.

The government has denounced “inflated prices” and 450 consumer complaints have been received by the Advertising Standards Authority, the advertising regulator, claiming that “the advertisements contained misleading information about the availability and price of tickets”. Defenders of the pricing have argued that the system prevents people from buying up a bunch of tickets and then reselling them at high prices.

This practice, which is nevertheless legal, is often perceived as a scam. Robert Smith, singer of The Cure, had denounced such a method in 2023 on the tickets of one of his concerts. The latter can also use user searches: the more something is searched, the higher the price will be because this reveals the urgent or insistent nature of the purchasing intentions. Prices then soar over the course of the simulations.

This model is particularly known in France for airline tickets, but here too it seems to be extending to platforms selling tickets for shows. “Can the model applied by airlines or the SNCF for a long time be duplicated? The question is no longer shocking,” recognizes Malika Séguineau, general director of Ekhoscènes, the main union of producers of live shows, to the Echoes.

To avoid falling into this trap, it is advisable to ask a friend or relative to do the same search and to communicate the price then displayed. It is also preferable to select, or even refuse, cookies or to opt for private browsing. The best thing is to be among the first to buy tickets, but for big events, this is not easy.